Will Elliott: The Pilgrims

Closer to the balcony, another of the snapping heads descends and bites, and the crowd tries to push away. Another drops heavily from the ceiling’s middle. Then two at the sides fall at once. Steadily as thrown punches, the lethal jaws fall into the cringing, screaming mob; arms, heads, sometimes whole torsos drop from the retracting mouths and fall back into it. There is an impotent push for the door. Soon they are all wet with showering blood, slipping and stumbling over each other for a few more seconds of life.

The Arch Mage alone can see with clarity the strange ripples spiralling and building in the room from all the death in these unstable magic airs. It is not structured enough to be a practised, deliberately created spell , as such, and that is truly alarming, for there yet seems a deliberate intent in the patterns at work. He also senses the direction towards which these ripples are already being drawn: back behind the castle, to the long high valley near the entry point to Otherworld. What this may imply fills him with terror, but he keeps it well cloaked and his voice calm. ‘ Some measure of instability is a good thing, don’t forget,’ he says quietly. ‘It means the Project is succeeding.’ The Strategists do not reply.

It goes on for a long time. Vous sings, and weeps.

Eric did not believe in ghosts, and was therefore quite surprised to wake from a vivid nightmare — people were in a pit, being killed by he wasn’t sure what — to find one standing in the middle of his bedroom. It seemed to be a man draped in white silk, to Eric’s eye not unlike a Roman emperor. It flickered like an image cast by an old projector. A white glow filled the room about it.

For a few long seconds Eric and this stranger eyed each other. Then the ghost’s arms rose as though to embrace him, its mouth opened, and words came out despite the lips not moving to form them. ‘ Last sight, last sound, last sight, last sound … ’ it sang in a voice thin and high-pitched: just about the most frightening sound Eric had ever heard.

He sat up, part of him as fascinated as the other part was afraid. ‘What does that mean?’ he said. ‘Who are you?’

‘Shadow, you are called,’ the ghost said.

Eric rubbed his eyes and then the ghost wasn’t there. There was only the shard of street light spearing through the window to fall on the Captain America comic book he’d spent three-quarters of an hour desperately trying to find earlier that night.

He flipped on the bedside lamp, grabbed the comic and had trouble reading it at first for the shaking of his hands. By morning, he’d actually managed to convince himself it was a dream. And just maybe it was.

Though it goes by another name there, the game of chess came into Levaal with one early group of human Pilgrims from Otherworld. They brought other things with them too — the way days and hours are measured, systems of numbers, measurements and more, all gladly adopted (for some reason) by the cities and temples. They brought seeds of plant and vegetable, which have grown here and thrived. Also species of bird and beast, including the very useful horses and dogs. Weapons too: bows and arrows, plate and chain mail, kinds of blades until then unknown here. And chess, chequers and backgammon, as well as other fine games.

The Arch Mage sits in his tower; light comes thinly through the high window and falls upon his half-melted face. Magic is not kind to those who use it, and it is hard to tell, looking at the Arch Mage, how gently he has been treated considering the vast amount of power that has gone through his ancient, ruined body. About his study are parchments on stands, with ink scrawled across them in writings nearly incomprehensible, even to him. These are composed spells in progress. Most are far too ambitious to ever be cast or attempted: a mere hobby, the way an alchemist might play with poisons. A homesick drake scratches about at the floor of its cage, the deep red shine completely gone from its scales, the flame dead in its throat as it waits to see what use its captor has for it, other than the pleasure of possessing such a rare creature — and the occasional extraction of its blood. There are jars filled with what appear to be smoky curls of coloured mist, which are rare power types found only here, in the castle’s inner airs: purified and concentrated thus, they are priceless. If destruction were to come to this room, it would be these jars the Arch Mage would run to, out of all his charms and treasures, to clutch to his chest as he fled.

Not that he wouldn’t mourn the loss of the old tomes lining the shelves in their hundreds. Possession of these books was once the cause of feuds and almost outright wars between the old schools of magic. Even the Arch Mage battles to comprehend some of the grave secrets written therein. He is occasionally saddened it was necessary to kill off the world’s major magicians … it would be nice to ask their thoughts. Then again, it was nice to pluck each tome from the smashed safe or chest of its ruined temple.

The Arch Mage views through the window glass the world he knows: Levaal, which is his chess board. He beholds its pieces, many of which are still stubbornly arrayed against him. Other pieces move indifferently, ignoring the human opponents facing off, trampling as they like across the squares while all others duck aside, waiting for them to pass.

Many old, mighty pieces — the five schools of magic, the half-giants, and more — have long been knocked off the board, for they were great threats to the Project. Their removal was difficult, perhaps the Arch Mage’s greatest accomplishment.

The Great Spirits are a different matter. They simply have limited interest in the games and affairs of humans, or so history claims. Which is not to say their presence doesn’t make the Arch Mage nervous, and take up large portions of his thought; the Project after all is about creating a Great Spirit from a man and perhaps, one day, facing off against the others. That will be a new game altogether.

Still, the Arch Mage has almost won the game in progress, the game of human rule and control. The six remaining Free Cities are his opponents, and they are in a very bad position — worse, it seems, than they themselves know. They do not yet know of Tormentors from beyond World’s End, but they soon shall. In months, another of the Free Cities may well fall and become Aligned with the castle. The rest will follow. To speed the process up would be pleasing.

The drake gives up its scratching on the cage floor and falls asleep. With a sigh, the Arch Mage reflects on the day’s events, and realises Vous no longer plays the same game as he does. No longer pondering moves by his side, now Vous is a piece on the board, a piece moving in its own directions, with no care where he, the Arch Mage, wishes to place it.

The Strategists, after today, have realised it too. What distresses them is not what happened to the peasants, of course; they themselves, like the Arch Mage, have given orders resulting in far more deaths than today’s, and they shed no more tears for peasants than they would for culled livestock or felled trees. Rather, what disquiets is the fire of their Lord’s personality spreading too wide, too quickly. Being close to it, they are perhaps right to worry.

The Arch Mage wonders how a more gentle, timid man would have fared in Vous’s place at this stage of the Project. And he begins to wish he had such a man on the throne now.

In the far distance, he sees the spiralling, winding thread of disturbed magic going skywards like a wavy line drawn in pencil across the white sky, indicating a powerful spell has been cast that way. A war mage, most likely; he does not concern himself with it. More troubling to him is the speck flying towards the clouds, then gone. It is an Invia, surely off to visit the dragonyouth in their sky prisons. They are pieces on the board he doesn’t know well.